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Will The New 'Copyright Alert System' Actually Stop People From Downloading Music and Movies Illegally?

Starting this week, those downloading movies, TV shows and music illegally in the U.S. are going to start getting called out for committing Internet fouls. Copyright holders RIAA and MPAA in partnership with five major Internet service providers are launching the “Copyright Alert System” a.k.a. “Six Strikes” a.k.a. “The Copyright Surveillance Machine.” What does it mean?

If you get your Internet through AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable or Verizon and you’re one of the millions who prefer downloading Game of Thrones, Dexter, and the Big Bang Theory for free through illicit channels, you may get a letter from your ISP letting you know that your copyright transgression has been spotted by the copyright holders’ ref. The “ref” is Thomson Reuters-owned firm MarkMonitor, which has 100 employees in its anti-piracy group and a suite of automated tools for watching Torrent sites to catch the IP addresses sharing and downloading content.

“We see 20-30 million infringements every day,” said Thomas Sehested, who is in charge of antipiracy services and technology at MarkMonitor. “Most people are unaware of how public everything they do online is. Whether they download illegal software or post to their Twitter page, a lot of people are unaware of how public it is, if you’re looking for it.”

The RIAA and MPAA’s members tell MarkMonitor which shows, movies and songs to look for, and it then performs its monitoring magic and sends along shame lists to the ISPs. (Interestingly, the porn industry which has long complained of the toll of illegal downloading on its profits was left out of the Six Strikes deal.) Each ISP comes up with its own system for “gotcha” emails to their customers but they’ll generally go like this: Copyright scofflaws will get up to six warnings, that grow more and more dire — first offering educational opportunities (“Do you know what IP ownership is, little boy?”), then mandatory education (You must acknowledge that you know what copyright infringement is before you can access the Internet.), and finally punishment in the form of slowed Internet speed for two to three days. After six warnings, do the MPAA and RIAA storm troopers raid your house and smash your computer to bits? Nope, at that point they just assume that you’re not capable of reform and you stop getting warnings. Is this actually going to stop pirates from going after their entertaining digital booty?

The system was negotiated by industry group the Center for Copyright Information, which became the RIAA and MPAA’s only hope after the dramatic demise of SOPA/PIPA — legislation that would have forcibly enlisted advertisers, merchants and search providers in the fight against piracy. CCI, which has an unofficial but approving nod from the Obama administration, has an annual budget of up to $2 million jointly funded by the RIAA, MPAA and the participating ISPs. Its role, beyond working out the logistics of the system, is the creation of the educational materials for those slapped with a copyright dunce hat. The Center already helps six-year-olds in understanding copyright, says the center’s executive director Jill Lesser, providing educational materials that are distributed in schools.

“We’ll also collect and analyze the data to see whether the alerts are working,” says Lesser. “We’re hoping the vast majority of people who are not intent on being pirates will respond to this. Undergirding the process is taking the large percentage of casual infringers and educating them about where they can find legal content.”

In other words, CCI is hoping to teach people not to search for “free download of Walking Dead” and click on the first site that turns up, and instead turn to Amazon or iTunes.

Will it work? We often incorrectly think that what we’re doing on the Internet is seen by no one. Simply getting notified that your illegal downloading has caught someone’s eye could be a deterrent. Many academic studies have found that the act of being watched makes us better citizens, so much so that just putting “eye” stickers on a tip jar makes us more likely to fork over some cash. Perhaps the warning system will work not because of fear of having slow Internet for a couple of days but because of the sensation of surveillance that the system will create. And if nothing else, it might notify people with open Wi-Fi that other people are jumping on their network for questionable downloading purposes.

“I think it’s going to be reasonably effective,” says Ernesto (who goes by that name alone), editor in chief of TorrentFreak, a website that covers pirate news and has been covering Six Strikes since talk of it first surfaced in 2011. “For consumers, it’s not a bad thing. I think there are a lot of casual downloaders who do it because it’s easy. A big group of those will be scared if they get these messages and will stop. They won’t know how to prevent these messages or not get caught.”

Those who profess to be innocent can challenge their warnings in hopes of not having their Internet slowed down. There’s an arbitration process to challenge a warning — say if you in fact had the right to distribute the file or if the file falls under fair use — that costs $35; if you win the case, that fee gets reimbursed.

It’ll be interesting to see if it works — or if it just results in a flood of users to services like Kim Dotcom’s Mega, where private cyberlockers make for less transparent media consumption. Regardless, it’s an interesting voluntary partnership between rights holders and Internet service providers, given the failure of enacting legislation around this, and gives copyright holders a way to communicate — if indirectly — with the people consuming their content for free online.

Correction (March 1): This post was edited to make a correction and a clarification. MarkMonitor is owned by Thomson Reuters not Reuters. A sentence was clarified to make clear that the company has 100 employees in its anti-piracy group, not 100 employees total.

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Me personaly I don’t think it will work. One thing is that you just can’t monitor other users pc with out a warrant of some kind. That overrides the private policy of ISP’s. The ISP can get sued for that.

The other problem is that Downloading Music and Movies is all over the internet. This all so includes out side the USA. There’s no way to stop it. Unless you take us back to the stone age.

and the last thing is. Just because Music and Movies get downloading doesn’t mean that people don’t go out and buy them. They can all ways buy them on line and have them shipped right to their front door.

Just an idea. If people wanted to protect their movies and music. Here’s some tips. Secure the DVD’s and CD Roms. Make sure no one can copy them. Copy protect your work. Most music and movies that you buy are just copies any way.

Last Thought, I don’t think no matter what you do. Downloading Music and Movies will never end or stop. You have to start at the source.

I understand that unauthorized downloading is wrong, but on the flip side you can already see that big brother lawyer activists rubbing there hands for potential unauthorized snooping/ infringing privacy lawsuits. You’ll also see people using more anonymous websites with proxy’s. AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon I’m sure are worried about this too. All it takes is one slip up on there part and they are looking at class action lawsuits in millions. Man every one wants money, money, money, money, that same money can end up biting them in the butt!!!

Yanno, I voted against the SOPA and PIPA legislations—I knew it was only going to curb the law makers, not stop them—but I never saw this coming. Well, actually, I lied. I mean, I knew someone was going to get together with this companies and make some eye that would watch us all, but I didn’t think it would get as big as it has. Sad news! You may have big money and big names under your belt, but I still don’t think any of that is going to help your mission. Will it slow it down? Yeah, probably. But you’re banking on that most people who download illegal and break copyright laws aren’t realizing they’re doing it—which is completely false—and will stop doing it as soon as they get the warnings. You’re wrong, and how oh how wrong you are. In fact, almost everyone who I talk to about downloading and pirating not only know what they’re doing, they don’t care.

As stated above, if you’re really wanting your free stuff a couple days with slower internet, and a couple of lame classes on stuff you already know about is a pretty low price so long as nothing more serious happens.

End result being waste of money—just like the other lame attempts to curb piracy—and a faded fad once they realize the time and resources wasted.

The seventh strike in the war on piracy should be a visit from the Hellfire fairy. A few smoking craters in the middle of a few subourbon (sp?) neighborhoods would probably fix the problem overnight. President O’Bama could provide cover by claiming that several additions to the Bill of Rights written in invisible ink had been discovered on the back of the U.S. Constitution which made everything perfectly legal.

I believe the piracy alert system will scare a few people who are not tech savvy. Those who know computers will figure out how to circumvent the monitoring. To some this new monitoring system will be scary. To others a it will be a challenge and provide boasting rights to say “I cracked the system.”

Originally, I believed it was the ISPs doing the monitoring. Using a private company to monitor means less hands on deck to enforce the issue. How does Mark Monitor make its money, per person cited?

Are we not infringing on copyright when we use a DVD recorder to capture a TV show, or record a song from the radio? How about when one copies an article or chapter of a book to read later?

People are forgetting or not informed about using a VPN when downloading things on the internet. For $5-$10 a month, you can get a very reliable and 100% private VPN so you don’t have to worry about getting messages from your ISP.

Until they outlaw VPN’s (which will never happen as most of them are located outside North America), it’s the best protection you can get for privacy and staying anonymous.